11 White Pills You Might Have Missed on TBPN
Anthropic finalizing $20B round, Higgsfield AI under fire, Sama announces new Codex model
Happy Thursday.
We’re live from YouTube and 𝕏.
The current things in tech and business are the “downfall” of Higgsfield AI, rumors that the ASU frat leader is Peter Thiel’s secret son and Founders Fund’s investment in Anthropic.
Today’s lineup
Blueprint Founder Bryan Johnson at 12:00 PM
Heatmap News Correspondent Matthew Zeitlin at 12:30 PM
Simile Co-Founder Joon Park at 1:00 PM
Lyft CEO David Risher at 1:15 PM
Okta Co-Founder and CEO Todd McKinnon at 1:30 PM
The Biological Computing Company Co-Founder and CEO Dr. Alex Ksendzovsky at 1:45 PM
Huberman Lab Founder Andrew Huberman at 1:55 PM
Daily Op-Ed, by Brandon Gorrell
11 White Pills You Might Have Missed on TBPN
The mood on the timeline has not been great. Against the backdrop of the unpleasant, unending comms wars where seemingly nothing is off the table between the biggest names in several of tech’s largest new categories like AI and prediction markets, the vibe of the day-to-day media cycle is overwhelmingly negative. There’s never unambiguous Good News because an equal amount of people process it as Bad News (often reasonably so). It’s exhausting. I mean, just look at this chart:
Anyways, we were reflecting on this at breakfast this morning. John and Jordi are off the newsletter today, so they wanted me to put together a quick list of white pills from TBPN guests we could remind our readers about today. Much easier to overlook — and forget about — than the tidal wave of anxiety and negativity on the discourse.
1. OpenAI’s Kevin Weil says 24/7 robotic labs could automate scientific discovery.
2. Melisa Tokmak exists, and is building Nectic to connect blue-collar workers with data center buildout.
3. Shopify President Harley Finkelstein said on the show yesterday that thanks to AI ‘co-founders’, more $1B businesses will be created in 2026 than were created in the last 100 years.
4. California Forever and Jan Sramek are building the first new major American city since the 1960s, and more housing in the Bay Area than San Francisco has built, cumulatively, since 1950.
5. Kimball Musk is building a company called Nova Sky Stories that will unleash drone swarms not for warfighting, but to create lifelong family memories for a worldwide audience.
6. Airbnb’s Brian Chesky will solve the issue of getting Airbnbs with friends. From our clip caption: “Airbnb's AI will use memory to tailor searches to users' bucket lists, and make suggestions for people who travel together in the Venn diagram of their interests.”
7. With his Terraform Industries, CJ Handmer will arbitrage the cost of solar against what he can charge for natural gas he produces from thin air with the electricity the cheap solar power generates.
8. Director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management Scott Kupor is creating compelling government tours of duty for young people to modernize government and bureaucracy.
9. Apple is eventually, hopefully, going to have an incredible VR courtside NBA experience where viewers essentially get a courtside seat to watch the action.
10. Anthropic’s Sholto Douglas says the cost of intelligence is getting 10x to 50x cheaper per year, meaning that we will soon live in a world where everyone on Earth will have access to all of humanity’s knowledge for the first time in the history of the universe.
11. Founders Fund’s Delian Asparouhov thinks that current trends in the American space industry will have us with boots on the ground on the Moon by 2027.
Here’s to a great Thursday — and the relaxing 3-day weekend coming up.
Headlines
Bloomberg: Anthropic Finalizes $30 Billion Funding at $380 Billion Value
NYT: Anthropic Puts $20 Million Into a Super PAC Operation to Counter OpenAI
Anthropic covering electricity price increases from their data centers
Forbes: Racist Videos And Payment Problems: The Dark Side Of This AI Startup’s Super-Fast Growth
The Guardian: Kim close to naming teenage daughter as future North Korean leader, South believes
FT: Apple faces new tensions with Trump administration
Bloomberg: Nscale Lines Up $1.4 Billion Chip Loan From Pimco, Blue Owl
Sama announces release of GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark for Pro users — “More than 1000 tokens per second!”
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Thank you for these updates
Grey pills, surely. Good for consumers but the uncertainty comes from political and economic instability